


Lost and found

by TheGan



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-14
Updated: 2012-07-14
Packaged: 2017-11-09 23:05:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/459482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGan/pseuds/TheGan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bishop loved and hated the Witness, but mostly despised Remy Lebeau.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost and found

He was perfectly logic for him to hate Lebeau.  
With time it had become a natural habit: waking up every morning before sunrise, polishing his guns, checking the school campus and, finally hating Lebeau.  
Partly because there was the solid possibility that he would become the infamous traitor and cause the X-Men’s end and the beginning of his future.  
Mostly it was for the guy attitude.  
Lebeau had the uncanny gift to get on his nerves without actually doing anything.  
The way he smiled, for example, like he hadn’t a care in the world, made Lucas want to strangle him here and there.  
It wasn’t that Lebeau was stupid, it was that he acted like one.  
Sometimes he had found himself thinking: “The Witness wouldn’t have done that” or “The Witness would have known better than to yell CHICKEN FIGHT at an extremely weighty teammate doing a reconnaissance on an icy precipice”  
But then, he had to admit, The Witness always had a twisted sense of humour. Like that one time when he had left him in a desert s without any warms, only because he had dared to backtalk at him.  
And still, even if the admission was costing much to Lucas, he had always found him reliable.  
In short: the complete opposite of Lebeau.  
Were they really one and the same, after all?  
At first he hadn’t had the slightest doubt on the matter, so he hadn’t hesitate to point blank try killing him on the spot.  
They had stopped him, of course, and since that, with the certainty of Lebeau future self slowly eroding between his hands, he had often regretted that they had done so.  
A spared life wasn’t really worthy all that stress.  
After Onslaught things had changed again. Now he wasn’t only unsure about the Lebeau/Witness identity, but even that The Witness had been a traitor at all.  
All those years spent on hating the old man for something he was actually a victim of…  
No. Lucas had stopped with a sense of incoming dread. He had begun hating The Witness well before starting to suspect him as the X-Men’s killer.  
When he had started?  
The Witness had been a father figure to him.  
Not a spectacular good one, but he had been there for him and Shard when no other adults, except for their granny, had before.  
He had been harsh with his punishments and he had had the bloodiest hands Lucas had ever seen (even if now he knew better). But there were moments when he had looked at them with a strange fondness and gifted them with some rare chocolate he had found somewhere (probably a Black Market somewhere).  
With his adult eyes Lucas was now able to see him: a sad old man, crushed by life so many times to find only in anger and bitterness the strength to pull it back together.  
Sometimes he thought that his and Shard’s leaving had pushed him over the edge.  
Sometimes he thought that he wouldn’t have mattered at all, that he had been too late to be helped or saved.  
Sometimes he thought that he hadn’t been his fucking responsibility from the start.  
Often he asked himself when he would stop trying to justify himself.  
And here there was Lebeau again, with his insistence to be called only Remy, with his disastrous male-bonding moments, with his fondness (for Lucas utmost horror) to call him “cher”.  
Smiling like an idiot all the time.  
Maybe he wasn’t the traitor he had thought, but Lucas wasn’t simply able to reconcile the sly thief with the image of his strict adopted father.  
Simply thinking about it made his head spinning and his knuckles turning white around the trigger of his gun.  
Lebeau was irremediable.  
He started to call him Gambit.  
The thief at first had been delighted by his sudden change of attitude, but when he had grasped the reason behind it he had shut himself like an oyster.  
Calling Lebeau, Gambit hadn’t been a sign of acknowledgement on Lucas part, but his statement of cutting the ties between the present Lebeau and his future self once for all.  
Of cutting any ties between the policeman Bishop and the thief Gambit for the better.  
Lucas hadn’t been able to bare their likeness even in their names.  
Lebeau had been a man to fear and respect. Not a fool who spent his free time making glassy eyes at girls and hitting pubs.  
He became so sure on this matter to not notice, at first, the signs.  
Sometimes Lebeau’s smiles were stretched enough to be painful, but not enough to reach his eyes.  
Sometimes there was a familiar haunted expression on the thief’s face.  
Fighting, losing, winning, quarrelling, hurting, living beside that young man slowly changed his vision of him.  
Lebeau wasn’t the noisy and annoying brat that made him sick in the stomach anymore, he was a young man warped up by a nightmarish life, that was trying to make the right thing regardless. Even if he kind of sucked at it.  
The thought both appealed and scared him.  
What was he supposed to do?  
Reaching to him and helping sorting out his messed up life?  
Did he have that kind of right after rejecting both his present and his future self?  
There was something that he could do without making things worse and even more awkward?  
No. There was nothing.  
It was too late for being supportive or searching in him the father that he had rejected and lost. It wouldn’t been right too.  
Even a simple friendship was strange after years of anger and distrust.  
They were resigned to be more than acquaintances, but less than friends, maybe comrades was the best suited term do define their complex relationship.  
He was unsure about where he stood with Lebeau even now, with the thief chained to a fucking giant rock like he was a Greek hero or something, asking them to kill him.  
Asking Bishop to kill him. Preferably quickly.  
He didn’t want to do it.  
It was the only way to save Earth from annihilation or conquest by a megalomaniac emperor, but he didn’t want to be the one to do it.  
There were too many things left unsaid between them, old wounds to heal, explaining to do, places to visit together (like returning to that strip bar where Lebeau had brought him before).  
He wanted to ask him about what would make him, in the end, the ruthless leader of the Stark-Fujikawa enterprise.  
He wanted to say that he didn’t hate him anymore.  
An end like this was unacceptable.    
He really didn’t want to be the one to pull that trigger, so he hesitated and the window of possibility closed upon him.  
He fired too late, but he fired nevertheless. An hollow sound echoed in the ancient room.  
The bullet found a barrier of kinetic energy on his way.  
The Earth was still in peril and Lebeau was still alive.  
Lucas discovered himself grateful for it.


End file.
